Editorial: Police Must Secure Their Guns

How Jose Ines Garcia Zarate came upon the handgun with which he killed Kate Steinle on San Francisco’s Embarcadero is among the mysteries of the infamous 2015 shooting. How the weapon ended up at large is not: The unsecured .40-caliber Sig Sauer was stolen from a federal ranger’s car while it was parked in the neighborhood a few days earlier.

Underscoring the disturbing frequency of such thefts, two firearms were stolenfrom a San Mateo County sheriff’s sergeant’s car Friday in the Tenderloin, not far from the scene of Garcia Zarate’s continuing trial.

This was not an isolated coincidence. Law enforcement officers’ firearms are lost and stolen with troubling regularity.